yet. The plane they arrived on came from Bogotá via Panama City, but there’s no record of them getting on at either place. And whenever I’ve asked her about either place, or anything about the time before she arrived, she just started to cry. She was crying when the uniform found her on the beach,’ he added.
‘She told you where Placida was?’
‘Not exactly. “In the hotel,” she said, but she couldn’t remember which one. So we just started with the closest, worked our way outwards, and found the place the next day. Placida wasn’t there, but there was a lot of blood and…’
He stopped for a moment, and she could see that he was picturing the scene.
‘The body was found in a canal about twenty miles away – they hadn’t done a very good job of weighting it down.’
‘In the hotel room, weren’t there any clues to where they’d come from?’
‘He’d cleared it out. Jesús, he told them his name was – Victoria remembered that in one of her lucid moments. He was young, Hispanic, medium height – one of a million.’
‘What about the passports?’ she asked.
‘The only stamps were ours. But the passports themselves are probably forged anyway.’
She felt disappointed with the information she had gathered, but could think of nothing else to ask. ‘Maybe Victoria will find it easier talking to me,’ she said, mostly to bolster her own spirits.
‘Did you know her before?’
‘Only by sight. My sister was – is, I hope – five years younger than me, and we didn’t have the same friends.’
‘Well, I’ll try and arrange a visit for tomorrow, OK?’
She managed a thin smile of gratitude. ‘I have no other reason to be here.’
John Dudley took his eyes off the lighted windows of the timber-yard office and turned to his partner. ‘Anything?’ he asked.
‘They just took a corner,’ Martin Insley told him from the armchair. ‘Seaman caught it.’
‘But how’s it going?’
‘Sounds pretty even so far. But you never know with Spain.’
‘He should have given Fowler a game,’ Dudley muttered as he put his eye back to the mounted telescope. Through the open window he could hear traces of the match playing on several TV sets, and over the gabled roofs to the south-west he thought he could make out the faint glow in the sky above Wembley Stadium. Everyone in London seemed to be watching the damn game – everyone but him and Insley. If only the damn boat had come in a day later.
It had docked at Tilbury soon after dawn that morning and had begun unloading almost immediately. The four thousand logs of tropical hardwood from Venezuela had been one of the first shipments ashore and after a cursory customs examination the importers had been cleared to reload them on the waiting fleet of trailers. A thorough search would probably have resulted in the seizure of a large haul of Colombian heroin, but the British authorities were hoping for more than drugs to burn. MI5 and the Drugs Squad were eager to break the new and highly ominous distribution link-up between the Colombians and the local Turkish mafia, while MI6 were more interested in the foreign end of the pipeline, and the man who ran it.
The logs had all been delivered to the timber yard in north-east London by mid-afternoon, no small feat considering the state of the capital’s traffic, and had been stacked in no apparent order in the open-sided shed. Since then Dudley and Insley had been watching them from the upstairs room of an empty terraced house some seventy yards away.
‘We’ve got another corner,’ Insley reported.
Dudley took one last look at the lighted windows, and walked across to grab the proffered earpiece.
‘It was a good save,’ Insley explained, as they waited for Anderton to take it.
At that moment they were beeped.
‘Fuck,’ Dudley growled, grabbing the handset.
‘The fax is coming in,’ a voice told him.
There was a pause, and in the background Dudley could hear the groan of the crowd. They were even listening in the communications room!
‘Five names,’ the voice said. ‘They all look Turkish. Beeper numbers and times. Amounts. Christ, there must be about two tons of the stuff in those logs.’
‘Did Six get their source?’ Dudley asked out of curiosity.
‘Yeah. The one they were expecting.’
‘Well, that should cheer the bastards up.’
In the suite occupied by the British Consulate on the fourth floor of the Swissbank building in Panama City the English contingent were gathered round a borrowed portable, willing the half-time whistle to blow. David Shepreth was probably the least involved of the spectators, and it was with no great reluctance that he deserted the TV to take the incoming message from London. It was brief and to the point, containing nothing more than the source number of the fax which had just been received by the London timber-yard office.
He placed it on the desk in front of him and punched out a number on the phone. Somehow he doubted whether the American Embassy would have closed down for Euro 96.
It hadn’t, and a few seconds later he was talking to Neil Sadler, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s Panama Field Office. He didn’t know Sadler anything like as well as his opposite number in Mexico City, but they had a relationship of sorts and Shepreth was curious to see what reasons the other man would eventually come up with for refusing his request.
‘Hi, David,’ the DEA man said cheerfully enough. ‘And what can we do for the British Empire today?’
‘I need an address to go with a fax number,’ Shepreth told him, then read the number off the paper in front of him.
‘No problem,’ Sadler said. ‘It’ll probably take me a couple of hours. I’ll call you back.’
‘Great, thanks,’ Shepreth said, and hung up, thinking that anyone who believed the Americans no longer ran Panama was living in a dream. Their only real challenger had been Manuel Noriega – ‘Old Pineapple Face’ as the media had less than affectionately dubbed him – and the General had been rather too assiduous in promoting his country’s number-one industry – the import and export of drugs. Involvement in itself might not have condemned him, but he had compounded his crime by giving Uncle Sam the proverbial finger, and for that he was now languishing in a Florida jail.
He was not exactly missed by his fellow-Panamanians. Like everyone else, the Americans occasionally did the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
Shepreth stood by the window for a few moments, staring out at the square of blue Pacific which filled the space between the two high-rise buildings on the other side of the Via España.
